The Race to Watch Last Night Was in Mississippi
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
by Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher
May 14, 2008
Senator Hillary Clinton deserves her due for her tenacity in winning West Virginia by a blowout. But short of some act of God, Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee. The superdelegates are going to continue breaking for him, and an Oregon victory should put him within a hand's reach of the nomination.
But the real "tell" last night was the third in a row of special Congressional election victories by Democrats this year. This includes two Deep South Democratic takeovers of Republican seats (Louisiana and Mississippi) and the Democratic takeover of Hastert's district in Illinois.
Yesterday, May 13, "Democrat Travis Childers won Tuesday’s Mississippi special election runoff for Sen. Roger Wicker’s (R) former House seat, handing Democrats the biggest of their three special election takeovers this cycle and sending a listless GOP further into a state of disarray."
All of these districts were not marginal Republican districts; they were large majority Republican districts, considered extremely safe GOP seats. Moreover, one seat was being vacated by the last Republican Speaker of the House and the other two are in the deep, deep south. The district Childers won yesterday voted 62 percent for President Bush in 2004.
Furthermore, in the two southern races, the GOP tried to tie the Congressional candidates somehow to Rev. Wright (you know the Willie Horton racist thing), but it didn't stick -- and we are talking about white folk in Louisiana and Mississippi! So, if politics is judged by results, the GOP is going to have a hard time resurrecting Wright in the general election to any great effect.
This bodes well for Obama in a race against a Republican candidate and not a fellow Democrat, as long as Obama can start redirecting his message of change to bread and butter economic issues.
As far as the faltering GOP leadership, the minority leader in the House, Rep. Boehner, issued a statement that the third straight Republican loss in special congressional elections in strong Republican districts was a wake-up call for "change."
Gosh, we wonder where he poached that campaign theme from? But in the case of a GOP, it's really an SOS for a defibrillator.
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
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